Roy Greenslade, in his weblog, is reporting that the journalists’ trade magazine, the Press Gazette, is on the brink of going into administration as its principle shareholder, Matthew Freud, cannot continue to take the £15,000 per week losses being sustained at present.
This latest development follows a week of speculation and commentary on the hacks’ mag.
For instance, James Robinson wrote in The Observer:
It is an irony that Press Gazette proprietors Matthew Freud and Piers Morgan have doubtless been reflecting on recently: they own a trade title for journalists that can’t attract enough readers.
Like many of the newspapers it covers, the weekly mag for hacks is not making money, despite Morgan’s valiant attempts to freshen its content and improve its design, and Freud has taken the decision to sell.
Read the rest of Robinson’s feature by clicking here.
In the Guardian, Kim Fletcher wrote:
The new owners played to the industry’s sentimentality by moving the magazine to Fleet Street, employed more staff but kept out of editorial matters and kindly put the contents up on the web, so that journalists who had traditionally stolen it from the one sub-editor who subscribed to it could now read it free anyway. And what was their reward for all these improvements and all this effort, for the £500,000 loss they chalked up over the year? The derision of a big section of the newspaper industry, which refused to come to the Press Awards, one of the few activities where the magazine makes money.
Read Kim Fletcher’s take on the situation in full here.
Journalism.co.uk offers a round-up of the reports here.
And visit PressGazette.co.uk’s own take on the situation here.
Greenslade’s update is here.
This entry updated 3pm on Nov 1